One of Ours

Quick. What is the name of the Palestinian village near what is now the Israeli city of Ramla that was destroyed in 1949 and replaced by a town called Yavne?

Too difficult? It's Yibna. Try another.

What structure built of gray sandstone in 1792 became the source of all oppressive decisions the world over?

This one should be easy: the White House.

If you answered both questions correctly, you might be prime fodder to compete on "The Mission," a game show running on Al Manar, the satellite television channel of Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese group...

...The show is a novel way for Hezbollah to promote its theme - that all Arab efforts should be concentrated on reconquering land lost to Israel, especially Jerusalem...

...The game show, begun last fall, is a tad more subtle than the channel's other offerings outside its fairly straightforward news shows. The program "Terrorists," for example, plays endless loops of film from Israeli attacks that killed civilians. "Sincere Men," drawing its name from a Koranic verse about the strength of the faithful when facing battle, profiles either Hezbollah fighters who undertook suicide missions or those in waiting...

...Some questions do focus on the men who carried out suicide operations. "The martyr Amar Hamoud was nicknamed 'The Sword of All Martyrs?' - true or false?" was one recent question. True. Mr. Abi Nassif, who never fails to address the subject of recapturing Jerusalem in his patter, went on to describe the man's exploits.

The questions range from the easy, "The French Revolution was in 1789, true or false?" (True) to the more esoteric, "What Abbasid era calligrapher introduced a new Arabic script, copied the Koran 64 times and maintained a flourishing school until Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258?" (Abu Hassan Ali Bin Hillal, of course.)...

...I'm not sure whether any British prime minister has reached the kind of popularity and esteem Tony Blair has in America right now. Thatcher was revered, worshipped, marveled at by conservative Americans. But their liberal peers, despite a kind of fondness that one might feel for a political version of Mrs Slocombe, knew that she was a Bad Thing. Too close to Reagan. Bellicose. Nasty to the poor. Churchill is still regarded in most elite and popular circles as a kind of twentieth century deity in America. But Churchill is now myth, not reality.

Blair, on the other hand, has followings in both red and blue America. The Bush-loving heartland will never forget his intuitive emotional support for the U.S. after 9/11, nor his stedfastness in the war against the Taliban and Saddam. And the Volvo-driving, Starbucks-drinking, Cape Cod-vacationing elites revere his eloquence. The great American liberal bores of today, after they have spent a few minutes describing how they are so much more intelligent than this embarrassment of a president, will subsequently - especially to a displaced Brit like myself - launch into a wistful account of how they wished they had a president like Tony...

...Blair could do enormous damage to Bush were he to distance himself radically. Bush, of course, could only do wonders for Blair if he did the same in return...

...Both leaders believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to civilization; both believe that weapons of mas destruction if combined with terror could literally destroy that civilization; both believe that the crisis is deeper and wider than many others want to think about. Both believe that the war in Iraq - far from being a diversion from the war on terror - is, in fact, the most critical moment in that war.

And both believe they are winning....In several major theaters of war, the West has made enormous progress. The Taliban no longer exist as a regime and al Qaeda has been damaged severely. One of the most destabilizing forces in the Middle East - the disintegrating regime of Saddam Hussein - has been removed. The most aggressive terror-state of the previous two decades, Libya, has come in from the cold. The younger generation in Iran is risking their lives and limbs for change.

And the possibility of a representative, pluralist government in a critical Arab state is now in reach for the first time - and that possibility offers the only, yes, the only, chance for real and lasting progress against the forces of Islamo-fascism...The most dangerous representative of Islamicist theocracy in Iraq, Moqtadr al Sadr, facing the prospect of a moderate government, decided to play his only card and seize power by force. He was routed by American forces and isolated by moderate Shiites. He has now essentially surrendered any possibility of future power in the new Iraq and will be lucky not to be in prison before too long...

...We do not yet know the details of the battle in Fallujah...In a matter of days, the insurgents were killed in vast numbers in classic urban warfare. The ratio of U.S. casualties to insurgent casualties was roughly one to ten...both sides had made their point. Iraqi extremists had made it known they would make life very difficult for American troops and try very hard to create a new Vietnam. The Americans made it clear they wouldn't buckle under and could destroy the insurgents, if push came to shove...

...the president, rattled by his slide in the polls, will accede to Brahimi's recommendations, let go of American micro-management, and return to the critical work of training the Iraqi security forces and exterminating extremists in the run-up to elections. So the Americans look like they are conceding something while they are actually achieving what they want. And the Iraqis can construct a new government without seeming to look like American stooges. Win-win.

Given that prospect, why on earth would either Bush or Blair break up their partnership now?...

...Bin Laden offered a truce. And who offers truces? People who are losing the battle. The reason Bush and Blair are still together is that they can see the distant, still perilous, but tangible prospect across the horizon. It may take many more setbacks. It may not prevent future atrocities. But in the events of the last few weeks, they can begin to see that success is not impossible. It may even, if we keep our nerve, become a reality.

At least there's no question about the flavor of the week. It's a scoop of regime-change second-thoughts, with a dash of "who lost Iraq by gaining it?"...

... we hear on all sides, including Lakhdar Brahimi of the United Nations, that de-Baathification was also a mistake. Can you imagine what the antiwar critics, and many Iraqis, would now be saying if the Baathists had been kept on?...by making it impossible for any big-mouth brigadier or general to declare himself the savior of Iraq in a military coup, the United States also signaled that it would not wish to rule through military proxies (incidentally, this is yet another gross failure of any analogy to Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, and all the rest of it)...

...I still recommend Kenneth Pollack's book Threatening Stormthe best general volume here. Published well before the war and by a member of the Clinton NSC whose pre-Kuwait warnings had been overruled by the first Bush administration, it openly said that continuing coexistence with Saddam Hussein had become impossible and that the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001...More than any other presentation, this prepared the ground for the intervention...

...The thing that I most underestimated is...the extent of lumpen Islamization in Iraq, on both the Khomeinist and Wahhabi ends (call them Shiite and Sunni if you want a euphemism that insults the majority), was worse than I had guessed.

And this is also why I partly think that Colin Powell, as reported by Woodward, was right. He apparently asked the president if he was willing to assume, or to accept, responsibility for the Iraqi state and society. The only possible answer, morally and politically, would have been "yes." The United States had already made itself co-responsible for Iraqi life, first by imposing the sanctions, second by imposing the no-fly zones, and third by co-existing with the regime. (Three more factors, by the way, that make the Vietnam comparison utterly meaningless.) This half-slave/half-free compromise could not long have endured...

The antiwar Left used to demand the lifting of sanctions without conditions, which would only have gratified Saddam Hussein and his sons and allowed them to rearm. The supposed neutrals, such as Russia and France and the United Nations, were acting as knowing profiteers in a disgusting oil-for-bribes program that has now been widely exposed. The regime-change forces said, in effect: Lift the sanctions and remove the regime. But in the wasted decade of sanctions-plus-Saddam, a whole paranoid and wretched fundamentalist underclass was created and exploited by the increasingly Islamist propaganda of the Baath Party. This also helps explain the many overlooked convergences between the supposedly "secular" Baathists and the forces of jihad...

...they ignore the many pleas from disputed and distraught towns, from Iraqis who beg not to be abandoned to these sadistic and corrupt riffraff. One might have seen this coming with greater prescience. But it would have made it even more important not to leave Iraq to the post-Saddam plans of such factions. There was no way around our adoption of Iraq, as there still is not. It's only a pity that the decision to intervene was left until so many years had been consumed by the locust.

People rooting for John Kerry this November probably cringed a bit while watching "Meet the Press" yesterday, when Tim Russert reminded viewers of Kerry's 1971 pronouncement that American soldiers should be sent abroad "only at the directive of the United Nations," and of Kerry's accusations the same year that American leaders were "war criminals" for ordering troops to commit what were essentially atrocities in Vietnam. But Kerry's response was quite possibly the shrewdest exercise in political jujitsu I've seen in years.
Here's how Kerry explained his U.N. comment:

That's one of those stupid things that a 27-year-old kid says when you're fresh back from Vietnam and angry about it. I have never, ever, ever, in any vote, in any policy, in any speech, in any public statement advocated any such thing in all of the years I've been in elected office. In fact, I say the following and I say it very clearly, I will never cede the security of the United States to any institution and I will never cede our security to any other country. No country will have a veto over what we need to do to protect ourselves.

And here's how he explained the "war criminal" comment:

That's a big question for me. You know, I thought a lot, for a long time, about that period of time, the things we said, and I think the word is a bad word. I think it's an inappropriate word. I mean, if you wanted to ask me have you ever made mistakes in your life, sure. I think some of the language that I used was a language that reflected an anger. It was honest, but it was in anger, it was a little bit excessive. ... It was, I think, a reflection of the kind of times we found ourselves in and I don't like it when I hear it today. I don't like it, but I want you to notice that at the end, I wasn't talking about the soldiers and the soldiers' blame, and my great regret is, I hope no soldier--I mean, I think some soldiers were angry at me for that, and I understand that and I regret that, because I love them. But the words were honest but on the other hand, they were a little bit over the top. ...

In both cases, Kerry wisely concedes the mistake, then provides a little context, reminding people that these were the understandable reactions of a young man who nobly served his country in a hellish situation, despite serious reservations. In doing so, he not only highlights a major strength of his own; he implicitly highlights a huge weakness of his opponent--namely, that Bush weaseled his way out of serving in said hellish situation. Somehow I don't think we're going to be hearing a lot of criticism from the Bush campaign about Kerry's youthful indiscretions.

...Now that we have had to sit through one of the most meaningless hearings in modern American government history--the 9/11 Commission--which reached its apotheosis of self-serving puffery with the Jamie Gorelickletter. In this apologia pro vita pomposa the attorney informed us thusly about the commission:

Its hearings and the reports it has released have been highly informative, if often disturbing. Sept. 11 united this country in shock and grief; the lessons from it must be learned in a spirit of unity, not of partisan rancor.

Oh, really? The commission has informed us of absolutely nothing, unless you have been inhabiting the Crab Nebula for the last three years. All I got out of it is the following: 1. Neither the Clinton nor the Bush administration did nearly enough to stop terrorism before 9/11. 2. The CIA and the FBI likewise did not communicate nearly enough before that date (to which Ms. Gorelick contributed in her small way) and 3. Various bureaucrats make nasty claims about other peoples' culpability. The other people disagree.

I could have told you all that for ten cents...